EVENTS

Correction: South Korea is NOT becoming another Texas

On June 8, I blogged about news reports that said that under pressure from South Korean creationists, their ministry of education had eliminated evolution from their science textbooks. This was, of course, rather bad since it suggested that creationists had established a beachhead in another country. I expressed surprise that a country that was surging in terms of science and technology was taking such a retrograde step.

It turns out that I was quite wrong. I received a private email from reader Dave giving a link that said this story was incorrect in many of its details and in its major conclusion and that far from deleting evolution from its textbooks, the South Korean government actually reaffirmed it. The article links to Korean news sources written in Korean so I cannot verify that that they say what is claimed but I have no reason to doubt it.

What apparently happened was that errors in two evolution-related figures that had been pointed out by creationists were replaced with correct ones. South Korean creationists apparently trumpeted this minor change as a huge victory over evolution and this was the story that was picked up by western media and highlighted, while Korean media that had access to the correct information treated it as the non-story it was.

So the idea that South Korea was becoming as dumb as Texas in its textbook adoption policies seems to be, thankfully, incorrect.

I apologize for contributing to the misinformation and thank Dave for correcting me.